Great cutters fake and do other things well too
A summary of my articles on cutting
Ultiworld published a paywalled article a few years ago titled Great Cutters Don't Fake. Here's the key idea from the un-paywalled introduction:
Just as great throwers don’t often initiate a throw that they have no intention of throwing, great cutters don’t often initiate a cut that they don’t expect to get thrown to.
I've never had an Ultiworld subscription so I've never read the full article, but the title neatly summarizes a lot of what I've written about cutting. So I thought I'd write my own version of "great cutters don't fake" to summarize the key ideas from my other articles on cutting.
What do great cutters do?
Great cutters fake
I don't know if the paywalled section of the Ultiworld article covers this, but...obviously great cutters make great fakes. A provocative title is nice but let's not pretend fakes and jukes don't have their place. John Randolph is pretty good at frisbee:
I imagine the article pushes against the tendency for someone to think that cutting is only (or mostly) about faking. Yes, it's important to have that balanced view, but I'd prefer not to lie in my titles.
Here are a couple other thoughts on faking:
The Ultiworld article links to a Twitter thread which has some faking-related comments that I disagree agree with. For example, there's this tweet from Benji Haywood:
...80% of cutting is positioning yourself so that more than one direction is a viable threat. If you have to fake somewhere you don’t actually want to cut to, then you started in the wrong place.
Although I agree about positioning yourself, faking to a place you don't actually want to cut to can work. There's things bad cutters do and things good cutters do...but go full circle and you'll find great cutters successfully doing things that on the surface seem like things bad cutters do.
So what is Benji missing exactly? He's not considering the defenders brains! It doesn't matter whether you fake towards a place you don't want to cut to. What matters is the next level: you don't want to fake somewhere the defense knows you don't want to cut to. If you're noticing things on the field, you will have a mental picture of what your defender knows and doesn't know at any given moment. You can use that information to fake towards a location that your defender doesn't know isn't a viable threat.
We can also take advantage of the fact that defenders have too much to think about. Defenders spend so much mental power focused on staying near their assignment. If a cutter explodes into a cut, even if they cut towards an un-viable location, their defender has to make a split second decision: is the cut really un-viable? If they don't respect the fake, they'll get burned if they guess wrong. And they have to overcome their bias towards staying close to the cutter they're guarding. There's so much to think about that defenders need to rely on instinct, and the main factor in that instinct is "I stay near this person".
So fakes towards un-viable parts of the field, if done correctly, can still work for two reasons: because defenders don't have too little information, and because defenders have too many decisions to make.
Another tweet said:
...In general, the proliferation of "stuff that works against bad ultimate players" is an issue in frisbee.
This can be true in some cases but false in others. As I've discussed before, even the NBA Defensive Player of the Year plays bad defense, sometimes. "I ran away from him while he was looking at something else" works against bad ultimate players, works against good ultimate players, and works against NBA players.
Even the people playing defense against top AUDL players like Sean Mott (see the link above) or John Randolph (video below) will be guilty of staring at the disc at the wrong moment. There's no hard line separating the things good defenders do from the things bad defenders do. Fakes don't only work against bad defenders.
With that out of the way, here are some of the non-faking things that great cutters do.
Commit hard
The subtitle of the Ultiworld article is Cutting is about recognizing dangerous spaces on the field and attacking them at 100% effort at the key time.
Attacking at 100% effort is another way of saying that you should accelerate as fast as you possibly can. Committing 100% to one cut will get you open much more than committing 50% to two cuts.
Stop-and-go cuts are another way to get yourself open without needing fakes or shoulder shimmies, all you need is the physics of accelerating hard.
Box out, before and after the throw
Great cutters understand how to use their body to box out their defender. Cutting is a continuously changing geometry problem, where there are constantly new opportunities arising to cut off your defender from a space they'd like to be in.
Boxing out for a disc in the air is an important skill that I haven't written about because I haven't found anything useful to say that hasn't already been said. Understanding Ultimate has a few articles on it.
What I have written about is the (in my opinion underappreciated) skill of boxing out before the cut or the throw even happens. The box out dump cut explored box out that happen during the cut but before the pass. Walking before cutting highlights the skill of boxing out before you even start your cut. In my opinion, these skills are really underrated. A combination of elite pre-pass boxing out and accelerating hard can consistently get you open on defenders who are more athletic than you.
Play with the defense's expectations
A great cutter will have the skill of figuring out what the defense is thinking about — what are they noticing? What do you know that they don't know? What are they expecting will happen next?
When you find an answer to those questions, you can get open by doing something the defense doesn't expect. The fake clear cut is one of my favorite articles. It highlights the way Levke Walczak gets open by quickly popping into an open space when her defender has been lulled into thinking she's just jogging back into the stack.
One of my first articles discussed the idea of pretending to be bored in order to get open. The defense is watching you and building their expectations based on what they see. Great cutters know that and take advantage of it.
Elite communication
Here's one I haven't written about yet, but might someday: communication. A great cutter communicates to get on the same page with their teammates. Communication can mean many things. Sometimes it's actually talking. Or a slight shake of the head to let the thrower know you don't think you're quite open enough and don't want the disc. It can mean making eye contact with their throwers and pointing to the open space where they want to get the disc. I'm convinced that elite cutters point at things much more than average cutters do.
Another aspect of great communication is never being more than a second or two from making eye contact with your thrower—you've got to be ready at all times. Not much is more frustrating for a thrower than seeing an opportunity but their cutter never makes eye contact and they can't express their intention. People will talk about the chemistry a thrower and cutter can have together after years of playing together, but using your hands and eyes to communicate on the field can generate instant chemistry with anyone who has the same skills.
See the field
Great cutters keep track of where the defenders are. Sometimes players—even in high level games—don't notice that they're wide open. A great cutter takes advantage of every easy opportunity the defense gives them. "Cutting" isn't always about running somewhere. In the end all the matters is whether you move the disc down the field and score. Being a master at "standing still in an open space and catching a pass" will take you surprisingly far as a cutter.
Seeing the field will allow you to move the disc down the field. Why gain only five yards on a pass down the field when you could gain ten? If you know where the defense is (even when you can't see them!), you'll know whether to run hard through your under cut or gain an extra five yards by slowing down and letting the disc come to you.
Seeing the field includes seeing your defender. If they're staring at you the whole time, you can take advantage of the things they don't know about the rest of the field. If they're checking in on the disc and the rest of the field (as they should be), you can take advantage by committing hard to your cut the moment they look away from you.
See the future
One concept that ties all these mental skills together is predicting the future. I wrote about this in Oodles of OODAs. Every time the disc moves, there will be new parts of the field that your defender loses knowledge of as they change their orientation. As soon as a pass leaves a thrower's hand (towards someone who isn't you), you should be thinking: where do I want to be when THAT person catches the pass and turns upfield looking to throw? (To be clear, you shouldn't be consciously thinking about this once you're a great cutter, it should be innate by then.)
When you make that prediction and commit to your cut, a few good things will happen. First, you're more likely to get open. Why? Because getting open depends on not just where you cut to, but on your defender's expectations. If you predict the future before they do, you can make a cut that they haven't yet figured out they should be expecting.
The second benefit is that the whole offense flows more quickly. Every time the disc moves, the defense gets further and further behind in their positioning and their mental understanding of the current situation.
Seeing the future gets you in the perfect position before your defender even realizes you've out-positioned them.
In summary
Fakes make highlight reels, but there's so much more to cutting than faking. Faking is one of the seven sections in this article, so you might say good fakes are 15% of what you need to be an elite cutter. Don't forget about the rest of it.
To see some of these ideas in action, I suggest watching the first point from NY PonY vs Raleigh Ring of Fire in the 2022 WUCC finals. Watch who catches the pass, then rewind and watch how they got open. After the first two passes we see a string of:
(33:04) Dillon Lanier gets open going hard under when his defender is sagging off deep
(33:09) Terrence Mitchell gets open under when he notices his defender took a few steps deep to help cover a deep cut
(33:12) Jack Williams gets open cutting hard across the field after some close-up boxing out
This is what great cutting often looks like—no fakes needed.